Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.

The Freedom Bill is a step back to sanity

Annabel Hayter refused to have a CRB check and was barred from flower-arranging at Gloucester Cathedral (Photo: JAY WILLIAMS)

Finally, we are seeing Labour’s illiberal snooper state cut down to size. The Freedom Bill will cut back the lunatic requirement on adults taking children to football training or cathedral flower arrangers to obtain a criminal record check. This does not mean, as its detractors are already starting to claim, that our children will now be at any greater risk than they were before. It is a common sense approach that has been all too rare in government in recent years.

The last Labour administration appeared to take the view that the entire country was a pool of prospective offenders, a national criminal ID parade that had to be controlled, logged, nannied and tick-boxed to distraction.

As a result, we have developed an unhealthy culture of suspicion that discourages adults from stepping in to help children in trouble for fear of being considered a potential molester and reported to the police.

Increasingly we live in a society where adults distrust each other and children are taught to regard everyone with suspicion, apart from their immediate family members (who are often the people who cause them greatest harm).

While CRB checks are necessary for people working closely and regularly with children -a and always were required along with testimonials and references – the Vetting and Barring Scheme was putting off thousands of people from volunteering. How would that help children?

A Big Society based on a culture of mutual suspicion is doomed from the outset.

Nick Clegg, who deserves credit for pushing this agenda, said in the Daily Telegraph today: "Freedom is back in fashion.” But for most of the country it never went out of fashion. The politicians took it upon themselves to impose constraints on people that they never wanted and did not vote for.

The most egregious of these would have been a requirement on every adult to possess an ID card and register on an identity database. On Thursday, the embryonic database and the few thousand records of those who were happy to sign up were destroyed. At one point, Labour wanted to join all the state databases together into one gigantic Whitehall Domesday Book.

The freedom legislation will also try to bring some proportion to other elements of state intrusion– like the CCTV cameras that festoon our streets ostensibly offering security yet which seem singularly useless when it comes to catching criminals (as opposed to voyeuristically filming their victims). Innocent people will no longer routinely have their DNA placed on a criminal database – and for those who say this will harm crime-fighting then let them argue for everyone to be on the database and see how far they get. We also need a commitment to remove the profiles of more than one million people never convicted of any offence that are still on the database. They include a grandmother arrested arrested for failing to return a football kicked into her garden and a 14-year-old girl arrested for allegedly pinging another girl’s bra.

This new Bill was described, somewhat extravagantly, as the most important reform of civil liberties since the 1689 Bill of Rights. In fact, it is simply a step back in the direction of sanity.